2. Query S3 with Athena

Chances are if you’re using AWS for anything, you’ve got data in S3. And wouldn’t it be nice to pick that apart and dig through it, where it sits?

Oracle had a feature called “external tables” and MySQL had something similar. Now Amazon is offering that native within it’s own cloud universe. Thanks to some tricky lambda code, now you can do that. Don’t worry how they did it, because it’s been packaged into a nice easy service for your use!

4. Expanded RDS

If you hadn’t heard, there is now MariaDB support. And with it, there’s a migration from MySQL to Mariadb as well.

Using Mariadb may bring you performance advantages & improvements. But RDS may mitigate this by productize & standarizing things.

You can also now move encrypted snapshots across regions. In my view this isn’t really a new feature, but rather fixing something that was broken before. The previous limitation was really more a symptom of their global network of data centers, than any built feature per se.